Chemical Plant Safety Resources

Three weeks ago, I read news about US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) guidelines on the prevention of explosion. These guidelines are aim to prevent explosion related to any hot work, which has caused many workers in the US died.

CSB developed these hot work guidelines after investigating 60 deaths in industrial explosion in the past 20 years in the US.

Let’s take a look at the explosion at a Packaging Corporation of America Plant in Tomahawk in 2008, (more…)

According to American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) journal article “Slips, Trips & Falls in Construction & Mining: Causes & Controls”, there are for factors that contribute to slips, trips and falls hazards in the workplace. They are workers, machines/equipments, works environment and management.

In addition, OSHA has released the top 10 safety violations for 2009 that placed scaffolding, fall protection and ladder in the list. They are directly connected to sources of slips, trips and falls hazards. (more…)

Fire accident that occurred at Imperial Sugar Company Plant last year left several important safety messages for us. The company was failed to put adequate precautions against combustible sugar dust hazard, as reported by Chemical Safety Board (CSB) recently. CSB said that the fire accident was entirely preventable as published in nyt.

According to CSB report, the explosion was triggered by the following causes: (more…)

A tank drain

This story was appeared while we were being audited by a fire insurance company. Here is summary of the finding.

“Sealing on pipe ends such as tank drain by installing plugs, caps, blind plates could prevent large spillage. This is especially important for tank that holds highly flammable liquid.” (more…)

There may be hundreds of indicators at the plant site, which may include instrument indications of pressure, temperature, concentration, flow, level, etc. It is impossible for the workers to remember all the normal operating ranges of each indicator.

So that’s why it is vitally important to put marking on normal operating range of these indicators. The workers or plant operators will easily recognize in early stage any abnormal conditions, system malfunction, failure or human mal-operation. Not only plant trouble that could be prevented but the most important is accident, fire or explosion. (more…)